Eberron: Dreaming of Riches

Of how the characters are caught in a crossfire between the Aurum and the Quori

10.7.2013: Strife

10

JUL/13

Once the characters woke up after the Night of Quelled Moons, Ravasys ordered something to eat from the sleepy barkeeper. Theo turned out to remain solidly unpleasant and depressed due to the lingering effects of the encounter with Vergen and Destir’s ego whip used to stop him. After eating breakfast, the party began searching for clues about Ryle Galt’s whereabouts. Ravasys merely loitered around Atur and Theo refused to co-operate with Destir. Having received no clues, Destir came to the conclusion that unless Atur was Galt’s destination all along (and the encounter with him in Grey Waters seemed to hint otherwise), his most likely action would be taking the lightning rail to Korth. He was reminded of the fact that such a line exists by a few quibbling, hungover Blood of Vol worshipers.

Destir set out to buy the party tickets to the next train to Korth. He ended up with steerage class tickets since that was all he could afford. Meanwhile, Theo made arrangements with the Blood of Vol cultists to have them mug him of his ticket. However, Destir did not trust him sufficiently to hand him the ticket which caused the plan to crash.

In the train, Ravasys set out to seemingly look for Ryle Galt in the better carts. He bribed the House Deneith guards to let him through and began exploring the standard class carts. In there, he overheard people speaking of the sad legend of the maddened killer and his ghost on this line. Having gone through the standard class carts, he stepped into the ghost cart and was greeted by the ghost of the little girl. Ravasys simply told her to stay there and stepped forward, his mind darkened by dark suspicions. And indeed – as he stepped over the boundary, the cart turned into its true form. He immediately made an attempt to escape, casting Knock and hurrying to the door. The allip charged him but Ravasys managed to escape it outside. However, he bothered to close the door which cost him the chance to avoid the maddened spirit’s touch completely. The allip reached him through the door and managed to fill his mind with maddening visions of a ravaged battlefield with the slaughtered soldiers staring at him, both their killer and victim.

Having escaped his encounter with the allip, Ravasys returned to the rest of the party. He remained silent about his encounter with the ghost cart and once the food trolley reached them, he simply filled his stomach with two helpings (both Theo and Destir bought one for themselves) of soup and cast a sleep spell on himself. However, the Quori were ready and Ravasys’s mind was twice ravaged: he dreamt of the nightmarish battlefield only to be interrupted with a Quori who began probing his mind. Ravasys was reminded of a case in his childhood, in which one of his teachers had been surprised during a feast on Ravasys’s friends’s brains. The shock awoke him but he pretended not to have seen anything but a bad dream. While Destir spotted that he was hiding things, the psion preferred not to press the matter at the time.

Once in Korth, Ravasys realized that he had never managed to obtain a set of identification papers. However, he managed to sneak past the White Lions guarding Northgate using an invisibility spell. Theo, on the other hand, hid his extra identification papers in his boots and buried his thieves’ tools in a pile of rubbish between storage houses in the lightning rail station. As such, he passed the security without trouble. Destir was not as lucky. The guards found the identification papers of Belenthidas on his person and took him in for interrogation. Destir managed to convince them of his innocence and even had the White Lions place a search warrant for Ryle Galt. He was told to stay in the inn near the Tower of the Twelve for he was needed as a witness in case the man would be caught.

For reasons unknown, Theo decided to swap disguises and he surfaced from an alley in his dwarven guise of Gindrick. Having seen the corresponding identification papers, Destir recognized him and paid no special attention to the change while Ravasys was baffled by the disappearance of Theo and the surfacing of this mumbling dwarf – not to mention Destir’s casual welcome of him. All this meant that Theo realized Destir having memorized his identification papers while he had been out cold. Since he remains very protective of his identity as Jared Aarland, this would cause him considerable pressure to silence Destir before the psion could destroy everything.

They arrived in the inn which was filled with members of all the Dragonmarked Houses and their companions who had been left outside the tower. Gindrick and Ravasys ordered whiskey and beer respectively, both a sizable amount, while Destir was happy with a room. Gindrick wished to interrogate Destir about how much did he know and whether or not that would spell trouble for both of them but the psion managed to plant a suggestion for the changeling to go to bed early and delay the inevitable clash. After all, the dwarf had seemed deadly serious about the matter.

Both Gindrick and Theo were visited by the Quori. They saw each other in their dreams (Destir saw Theo in his familiar form of Theo Dranista). Theo’s dream was situated in a summery park in Thaliost and Destir was sitting opposite to his bench. Destir, on the other hand, was dreaming of a lecture and saw Theo sitting a few rows in front of him. Both were interrupted by the Quori materializing and they saw on the other’s visage what was happening to themselves. With a considerable mental effort, Theo managed to break free and wake up. Destir, however, was to reflect on everything that had happened again and again, listening to the Quoris’ fervent questioning. In the end, he was robbed of his memory of what the Dwarven scripture on the puzzle box means (and actually, of Dawkens ever having told him at all). At that point, he woke up.

The next morning was grim, to say the least. First thing in the morning, Gindrick began questioning Destir. Destir was forced to admit that he had indeed looked through the identification papers and that he knew who Gindrick really was, as his actions had led to understand. Furious but still unsure of what to do, Gindrick left things be for the time being since their mutual dreams were brought up. Destir also remembered Ravasys’s concealed checking of the back of his neck when he woke up and began suspecting that he had also been visited by the Quori. Since they were working with minimal clues, a lot of accusations were thrown around (mostly by Gindrick at Destir). The psion’s test whether or not the things in their dreams had indeed been Quori by speaking their alien language did not help matters. However, they remembered their original mission to speak with representatives of the Twelve and asked the halflings of House Ghallanda in whose inn they were staying about how to reach the Tower. The halflings promised to convey the demand for entry if the party would state their purpose. In the end, an emissary (Ricard d’Kundarak) was sent immediately to fetch them since their message had been deemed a priority. He took them under the tower and began floating them up a stone platform underneath the floating academy.